On Panda's Thumb: Do we have free will? Part II

Spoiler Alert: Pseudo Question!

The free will-determinism dichotomy is an illusion

This is the second part of a two-part series where I discuss a post by Matt Young on the evolution website "Panda's Thumb" entitled Do we have free will? No.  See here for Part I.  In his post Matt mentions that in 2001 he wrote a book with the title of No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe. This is what he says of his book:

MATT YOUNG: In that book, I argued that humans were biological creatures and therefore governed by the laws of physics. Those laws are deterministic (we will get back to that in a minute), so everything we do, think, or decide is determined by those laws. We may think we have free will; we certainly have to act as if we have free will; but in fact we have no such thing.

MY COMMENT: I wouldn't take issue with Matt's statement that humans are biological creatures and therefore governed by the laws of physics.  After all, as a Christian I support the view that our highly contingent physical regime has been reified from the platonic realm in an act of Divine creation and therefore displays miraculous wonders every second of the day; it can have no property of Aseity and therefore its mere daily existence is a sign and wonder. Where Matt falls over in the above quote is that he's barged straight into subject as if we have a clear idea of what freewill and determinism are about; but we don't: See my series where I took to task a Christain who was also sure that the dichotomy was absolutely uncontestably clear and meaningful; that it certainly is not! My understanding is that even a computer running a deterministic program can be said to have "free will" in that it makes choices/decisions according to its physical make up; but it loses that freewill if outside influences coercively steer it away from its natural decision tree. I don't necessarily dispute that the laws of physics govern human behavior, although we must caution that it is clear from the state of physics that in spite a substantial understanding of the "algorithms" which constrain the patterns of the cosmos we cannot claim to have a comprehensive understanding of those laws. But as I show in my series I've linked to, the conclusion that we either have "free will" or "no free will" is an unintelligible dichotomy. 

MATT YOUNG: Now before you get your knickers in a twist, none of the foregoing implies, for example, that we should not punish criminals. The pain they may inflict is real, and we may have to separate them from society until (or unless) they reform. I suggest, however, that their lack of free will suggests that we should be rehabilitating rather than punishing criminals. But that discussion is a little off-task here.

MY COMMENT: Interesting to note that Matt in his comment about the pain criminals inflict is very probably implicitly making an empathetic extrapolation whereby he perceives the first-person perspective of other human beings; that is, he is implicitly recognizing the existence of private consciousness. 

Yes, I think I agree with Matt's rehab line but the awful public punishment spectacles of times past were a primitive attempt to interfere with human psychology via a kind of social aversion therapy; that is, fear of the consequences of transgressing the societal status quo help keep law and order. It's a crude kind of rehab on the social level. It may well be that the sometimes-irresistible instinct to punish & wreak vengeance (something we all feel at times) is a proximate motivation which finds its utility in more primitive contexts.   In fact, in times of war it swings back into action, with a vengeance.

MATT YOUNG: When I wrote NSO, I assumed that quantum mechanics was itself purely deterministic and that someday we would discover an underlying, deterministic theory. It simply seemed unreasonable that, for example, an atomic nucleus would decide all on its own to emit an alpha particle, rather than being caused to do so by some external agency. It still seems unreasonable to me, but it may not be right

.MY COMMENT: Interesting to note that Matt was inclined to rebel against the idea that QM presented randomness. I suspect two motives for this: 

a) Prior to the coming of the new mechanical sciences there was much more scope for attributing inexplicable events to the fiat of spirits and gods.  In contrast under the new paradigm stuff happened because it conformed to known (or perhaps as yet unknown) mathematical patterns. But the notion that events, some events at least, are part of larger random patterns seems to leave the door ajar for the introduction of superstitions about spirits and gods manipulating the world via fiat. After all, the apparently acausal nature of randomness is counter intuitive and spirits and gods may be resorted to as a way of restoring conventional ideas about cause and effect; human beings find it hard to except patterns at face value. 

b) Determinism, if it can be expressed in terms of succinct mathematical algorithms which can be humanly grasped, gives us the feeling that it wraps things up in a neat package and looks to be a big step toward a closed ended system that crowds out divine fiat - or so it seems.

So, it is my guess that Matt is sublimating here an ulterior need for an intellectual hegemony which lives in the hope of tying up all those loose ends with a comprehensive system of intellectually tractable deterministic laws or algorithms which describe all that happens in the universe; This is the search for explanatory completeness.  It is futile quest destined to end with a hard core of unexplained brute contingency - and I'm talking about "explanation" here in a sense that is more satisfying than mere mathematically tractable descriptions. 

But, and here is the big "but", randomness is just another pattern albeit with the mathematical property that it requires either very large algorithms to specify it or very long algorithmic generation times. In the final analysis randomness presents us with the same mysteries that underlie those humanly tractable deterministic patterns: Viz: From whence come these ultimately contingent patterns of behavior? What sustains their reification moment by moment and place by place? Their mystery isn't to be found just in their instantiation in mathematical generators at the beginning of time but also in that they continue to work everywhere and everywhen when in fact there is no logical necessity (i.e. no Aseity) that they should continue to do so. 

 

MATT YOUNG:  Does quantum mechanics then come to our rescue and somehow grant free will? No. First, so many molecules are involved in, say, neurotransmission that their action may be considered completely classical and therefore completely deterministic. Even so, the occasional quantum fluctuation would not so much grant free will as it would make our decisions somewhat random, a condition that I think proponents of free will would not particularly care for

.MY COMMENT: It is possible that the human mind, like many other systems in the cosmic physical regime, is a non-linear feedback system, making it chaotic and therefore influenced by the butterfly effect of random quantum events. This actually may be a useful feature as the mind seeks creative solutions to problems: The randomness is exploited to provide useful novelty, but this doesn't necessarily mean human decisions are random; our decisions are likely constrained by overall teleological considerations that regulate this novelty, selecting or rejecting those randomly generated contingencies according to the goals and aims of the human complex adaptive system. 

However, it's true that I can't be dogmatic about the foregoing paragraph, but it does mean that Matt's conclusions above are in no way obliging. 

MATT YOUNG:  Quantum randomness may have been critically important to the evolution of the early universe. If we ran the “experiment” again, we might, for all I know, end up with a very different universe, one that does not even include us. That said, quantum randomness has very little effect on our daily lives, unless you count, for example, cancers induced by radioactive decay or cosmic radiation. Thus, as Sapolsky would argue, everything we think, say, and do is wholly and unequivocally determined by our detailed histories (except, as I have noted, for the occasional quantum fluctuation)

MY COMMENT: Matt's first two sentences here may well be true, but I feel he is likely to be wrong that quantum randomness (if it exists) has very little effect on our lives given that non-linear feedback systems are ubiquitous in our world. But this question, in my opinion, has very little impact on the free will-determinism question: The latter question as I have shown is really bound up with our definitions.

MATT YOUNG : I conclude, then, that we have no free will in any sense. I do not understand why some people consider that threatening; it simply is the way it is. We feel as if we have free will, we act as if we have free will, and we are treated as if we have free will. Free will is thus a useful fiction, but in reality it is only a fiction.

MY COMMENT: Determinism, as I've implied, is a perspective effect that is a function of the level of epistemic tractability of the patterns in nature. Determinism is an epistemic spectrum which runs from those simple (that is, short) algorithms of elementary physics which we find relatively easy to handle, to the much more complex patterns of apparent randomness, patterns which do not yield to simple algorithmic expressions. Ergo, determinism is a subjective category which depends on one's information, i.e. it depends on one's perspective. Matt's triumphant conclusion that "we have no free will in any sense" is as incoherent as those who hang onto to freewill categories. 

The two sides in this polarized debate between so-called "freewill" and "determinism" advocates find one another's stance threatening because they undermine each other's dearly held philosophy.  But for me their respective positions are void of intelligibility.